Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade

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It was the best of shows. It was the worst of shows. Whenever I had to cover my tracks, I simply called it Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

I have been writing about Japanese comics and animation for almost two decades, taking potshots at anime, manga and related fields, spreading scurrilous gossip and telling tall tales. And my friends in the business didn’t seem to mind, as long as they had plausible deniability, which meant that sometimes, even though the real name of a work was obvious to everyone, I needed to call it something else.

So I picked three random words out of nowhere: Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. At first, it was one of many fake titles, along with such creations as Warriors of the Test Card, Geek Gets Girls and Devil Devil Beast Beast. But there was something about Schoolgirl Milky Crisis that captured readers’ imaginations, and the non-existent show began to crop up regularly in my columns on the UK Sci Fi Channel’s website, in Newtype USA, and later in the Judge Dredd Megazine, NEO, and SFX Total Anime.

As time passed, colleagues approached me with woeful grievances and axes to grind. They would press documents into my hands naming names and stirring trouble. All they asked was that if I talked about this terrible show or that awful production experience, I should make sure everyone knew it was Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

This blog is just a taste of the kind of things in the book that is due for publication in early 2009. The book contains serious newspaper articles, seminar speeches, frivolous web journalism and bitchy gossip from the specialist anime press. There is hard, useful information there, even in stories about gloves full of custard and snowball fights with martial artists. As part of the selection process, my editors and I have focussed on material that educates and informs, even if also discussing the ethics of sending celebrity guests to bondage clubs.